Rancour's emphasis on the obviously dark corners of Stalin's mind pre- cludes introduction of some other points to consider: that the vozlzd' was a skilled negotiator during the war, better informed than the keenly intelli- gent Churchill or Roosevelt; that he did sometimes tolerate contradiction and even direct criticism, as shown by Milovan Djilas and David Joravsky, for instance; and that he frequently took a moderate position in debates about key issues in the thirties. Rancour's account stops, save for a few ref- erences to the doctors' plot of 1953, at the end of the war, so that the enticing explanations offered by William McCagg and Werner Hahn of Stalin's conduct in the years remaining to him are not discussed. A more subtle problem is that the great stress on Stalin's personality adopted by so many authors, and taken so far here, can lead to a treatment of a huge country with a vast population merely as a conglomeration of objects to be acted upon. In reality, the influences and pressures on people were often diverse and contradictory, so that choices had to be made. These were simply not under Stalin's control at all times. One intriguing aspect of the book is the suggestion, never made explicit, that Stalin firmly believed in the existence of enemies around him. This is an essential part of the paranoid diagnosis, repeated and refined by Rancour. If Stalin believed in the guilt, in some sense, of Marshal Tukhachevskii et al. (though sometimes Rancour suggests the opposite), then a picture emerges not of a ruthless dictator coldly plotting the exter- mination of actual and potential opposition, but of a fear-ridden, tormented man lashing out in panic against a threat he believed to real and immediate. The Mind of Stalin should serve to stimulate thought about the treatment of "enemies" in any event. Despite the problems in his work, some of which may well be inherent in the approach and the topic itself, Rancour has gone beyond others and in new directions to investigate Stalin's psyche. The author's thoughts on Stalin and homosexuality and his feelings toward Hitler are neatly con- structed. The sections on projection are especially absorbing, as are the points about Stalin's fear of being victimized. Rancour's book is well worth the time necessary to read it, at the very least for the force and stimulation of the argument. Robert W. Thurston Miami University Paul Avrich. Anarchist Portraits. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. xiii, 316 pp. $27.50. Paul Avrich has never offered a general overview of his speciality, the history of anarchism. No single work of his can therefore claim as many readers as the general histories by James Joll, for example, or George Woodcock. And yet Avrich is easily the most prolific historian of anarchism today. Through a distinguished career and numerous books, ranging from The Russian Anarchists in 1967 to The Haymarket Tragedy in 1984, both the leading works on their subjects, Avrich has built a reputation upon his blend of extensive research, a graceful and highly readable style, and a keen, sympathetic but not uncritical eye. Readers of this journal will be interested above all in the Russian dimen- sion of Avrich's Anarchist Portraits, but the essays written over twenty years and updated here range far beyond that. Their division into three sec- tions, Russia, the USA, and beyond, is somewhat arbitrary; for the entire volume, like the movement itself, is international in character. It discusses anarchists in France (Paul Brousse), Germany (Gustav Landauer), Australia (J. W. Fleming) and Brazil, as well as the visits to the USA by major figures (Bakunin, Kropotkin), or their influence there (Proudhon). Even the section on the USA dwells only on one figure, the publicist Benjamin Tucker, whose entire active life was spent in the USA (and Tucker retired to France). Other chapters on the USA deal with two Russians deported from it (Alexander Berkman, Mollie Steimer), a British immigrant (C. W. Mowbray), an imprisoned Mexican (Ricardo Flores Mag6n), and the Italian and Jewish anarchist movements there, the latter in a wholly new essay. Similarly, only one Russian subject spent his entire life in that country: Anatoli Zhelezniakov, who dispersed the short-lived Constituent Assembly in January 1918 with the words, "the Guard is tired." Russia's contributions to the anarchist movement are clear from the fact that its chief shapers between 1848 and 1914, along with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, were Bakunin and Kropotkin, who had both fled to the West from Russian confinement. But the creed appealed not only to conscience- stricken aristocrats like Bakunin and Kropotkin, but across all the strata of Russian society. Volin (V. M. Eikhenbaum) came from a well-educated, middle-class family of assimilated Jews, while Zhelezniakov was a sailor, and Nestor Makhno, the leader of the Ukrainian anarchist army of 1918-20, a peasant. Revolutionary Russia, moreover, provided the arena for the first clash in reality, and not merely in theory, between anarchists and centralizing state socialists. Ever since the struggle between Bakunin and Marx that under- mined the First International, anarchists had warned that the seizure of po- litical power and the introduction of socialism from above could only mean an exchange of masters for the masses, new mechanisms of command wielded by a new ruling oligarchy. Initially a good deal of cooperation was possible. Zhelezniakov, sentenced to fourteen years by the Provisional Government, escaped to be elected from Kronstadt to the Second Congress of Soviets. He stormed the Winter Palace and commanded both naval and land forces during the Civil War. The Bolsheviks outlawed him for oppos- ing the reintroduction of militarization, but he later cooperated when re- cruited by them to command an armored train against Denikin's counter- .